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The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the NETmundial initiative (CD Aug...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the NETmundial initiative (CD Aug 28 p4) for its lack of transparency and its association with the World Economic Forum, Jeremy Malcolm, EFF senior global policy analyst, said in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1rE36du). The…

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EFF was invited to participate in the initiative, he said. The initiatives’ participants and steering committee members were “hand-picked by the organizers rather than being nominated by their own stakeholder groups (as, ironically, the NETmundial Principles set out as a best practice),” he said. Malcolm said civil society groups were accused of being “exclusive and elitist” for raising such concerns. EFF and others are “entitled to object to what is essentially a pre-cooked, big business initiative (well intentioned as it may be) from co-opting the name of an overtly more inclusive and grassroots-directed Internet governance meeting,” he said. The initiative won’t do “any harm, but initial indications suggest it is far from an ideal model of global Internet governance in action,” Malcolm said.